What can we learn from C-14. Does Carbon 14 prove that the earth is millions of years old? Or is C14 proof of a young universe? Radiometric Dating can be used to measure the age of fossils, but how accurate is it? Carbon Dating actually is a Christian’s friend when understood properly. Keep reading as I explain several ways that Carbon-14 dating has affirmed what the historical accounts in the Bible already told us.
In the next few moments, we’ll learn that C14 has been found in diamonds, supposedly one of the oldest substances on earth. We’ll learn that radiometric dating is based on false assumptions. We’ll learn that rocks of KNOWN AGES have been dated some 240 THOUSAND times older than their known age!
DINOSAUR BONES AND CARBON 14:
I lead paleontological digs and have dug up the bones of these monsters that you see in the movies. They were real. But there’s a few things that we hear about these creatures that are not based on fact. One is the supposed “AGE OF DINOSAURS”
1. When I dig up the bones, I have never yet found a date stamped on one saying “deposited 65 million years B.C.” In fact, what’s getting a lot of attention within the scientific community these days is the discovery of soft tissue inside some of these bones. This soft tissue should not even last for 100 thousand years… much less the millions required for evolution.
2. You might have heard that the last dinos went extinct millions of years ago, but dating methods show huge discrepancies in the alleged ages of dinosaur remains. There’s something going on here. Recently, a dozen carefully collected and preserved samples of fossils and dinosaur remains were sent in for testing. Measurable amounts of Carbon 14 were found in all of them. The maximum limit for C14 is 80 to 100 thousand years! The current evolutionary theories need at least 50 million. Maybe it’s time for a reevaluation?
So, are dinosaurs real? Sure, they’re real. They’re even found in the Bible! But the word dinosaur is a recent term, and until modern day, most people called dinosaurs, “dragons”. Dinosaur means terrible lizard, and while they certainly were very large lizards, we don’t know how terrible they were. But they must have been a sight to behold! We often think of the term “dinosaur” as meaning prehistoric or ancient, but there are accounts all around the world of people fighting huge, terrible lizards and dragons. Think of medieval legends and Chinese symbolism. Maybe there’s more to the story than we’re being told in schools. Maybe the children’s stories and fairy tales about these dinosaurs living 65 million years ago are just that – Fairy tales.
The truth is that discoveries in Paleontology USING C14 DATING are evidence of the Bible’s accuracy when it comes to dating.
C-14 IN DIAMONDS?
For there to be any hope that evolution happened, our earth must be millions and billions of years old. After all, without millions of years there’s no way that an amoeba or a frog or a fish had time to evolve into a man. Now, many people mistakenly appeal to carbon-14, or C-14, dating to support the supposed old ages that evolution requires. But C-14 dating isn’t used to date things that are thought to be millions of years old. That’s because C-14 doesn’t last very long. It decays away rapidly. If our whole earth were made of nothing but C-14 atoms, after just one million years there would be nothing left! Okay, so no evolutionary scientist expects to find C-14 in a fossil they believe is millions of years old.
Carbon 14 can be detected using an incredibly accurate and high-tech machine called an accelerator mass spectrometer, or AMS. Now, these machines must be checked occasionally to make sure that they are not picking up any background contamination from the laboratory. Rock samples that supposedly contain zero C-14 (like fossils, coal, and limestone) are used for the test. The problem? Labs began realizing that the test samples had measurable amounts of C-14 in it! So, the scientists concluded that the samples all must have been contaminated somehow, even if they had been thoroughly prepared for the test to ensure no contamination. Interestingly, a blank sample measured zero C-14 so it wasn’t a machine error!
Watch this video below that explains this further:
The conclusion that these scientists refused to consider was that the rock and fossil samples were not millions of years old. And yet how else do you explain C-14 in supposedly old rocks and fossils? It shouldn’t be there if the ages are even remotely accurate.
But the problem gets even worse for old-earth evolution. Diamonds are considered by secular geologists to be billions of years old. They are the hardest natural substance and so they resist contamination. Diamonds are formed over one hundred miles below the surface and are brought up extremely quickly by “pipes.” It’s nearly impossible that diamonds could be contaminated by any foreign C-14 and there shouldn’t be any intrinsic to the diamonds if they are billions of years old.
Well, C-14 has been found in diamonds! This C-14 must be part of their original composition when they were formed deep in the Earth. But it can’t last a million years, let alone a billion! This is a huge problem for secular geologists, who believe dates of billions of years. They believe in a theory, despite science in the lab giving conflicting data.
When we start with God’s Word these findings make perfect sense. According to the Biblical record, the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Diamonds, probably part of the original creation rock, are only 6,000 years old so C-14 has no problem lasting over this amount of time. Most fossils and rock layers were formed during Noah’s Flood around 4,000 years ago so it’s no surprise they have C-14 in them. The observational evidence doesn’t support millions of years and without the millions of years there’s no chance whatsoever that evolution has happened.
I actually have a 3-video set that I produced discussing Radiometric dating in detail with a top nuclear research scientist, Dr. Mike Houts, that has worked with NASA for years. Check it out HERE or by clicking the picture below.
Rock Dating Errors – Ten-Year-Old Rocks, Dated at 2.4 Million Years using Carbon Dating?
Mount St. Helens was once cone-shaped, but it’s not like that anymore! Now it’s a horseshoe shape. That’s because, on May 18, 1980, this volcano blew its top—literally! The top 1,300 feet of material blasted away, leaving this crater. Eventually, lava flows formed a new dome—five new domes, all of which were destroyed by subsequent eruptions.
The sixth dome that formed between October 1980 and ’86, is what you see today. It’s composed of 2.6 billion cubic feet of lava and is quite young, having finished forming just thirty-three years ago.
In 1996, geologists sent rocks from this lava dome to the radiometrically dated. They used a method called potassium-argon. Now, here’s how radiometric dating works. Radioactive isotopes decay, at presumably predictable rates, called a half-life. As they decay, they turn from one isotope—such as potassium—into another, in this case, argon. Scientists measure how much potassium and how much argon is in the rock and calculate the age of the rock.
Now, creation scientists have pointed out for years that there are some major problems with radiometric dating. One big one is all the assumptions it’s grounded on. You must assume the half-life is constant and never varies. You must assume that there was no contamination, for example, no argon was present in the sample before decay began. That’s a lot of unprovable assumptions!
Now, if radiometric dating—and the assumptions it’s founded on—was accurate, the Mount St. Helens rocks should have yielded very young ages—after all, the rock was merely a decade old! The problem is—they didn’t. The rock gave an age of three hundred and fifty…thousand years! When they dated the minerals within the rock, the problem got worse. They gave dates of 2.4 million years! For a ten-year-old rock!
Mount St. Helens highlighted that we shouldn’t trust the dates given by radiometric dating. The assumptions clearly aren’t accurate, so the dates they give are inaccurate. Instead of trusting a method that doesn’t even give correct ages for rocks of known age, we should trust the Bible’s history which tells us our earth is young, just around six thousand years old.
CONCLUSION:
Long story short, Carbon 14 can never be proof of an old Earth because C14 should have totally disappeared in less than 100 thousand years, even based on secularist’s assumptions. Yet C-14 has been found in so many “old” specimens that have been tested, indicating that the entire earth is ALSO only thousands of years old. Next time a skeptic tells you “We know that evolutionary ideas are true because of Carbon-14…” you can use this information to counter with truth… lovingly but confidently… and can state that the Bible is true from beginning to end. Most scientific discoveries have been pointing that direction, and this includes Carbon Dating.
I’m David Rives…Truly, the heavens declare the glory of God.
Here are 2 more articles by some of our Creation Club contributors talking about Carbon-14 Dating:
If you have further questions or comments, we appreciate your sincere interest in this topic. Because of the thousands of emails we receive every week, many times emails don’t get answered for months. That is the reason we created this page, to compile some of the research our ministry has done on the issue. As we address more, we’ll simply add to this page, to try and keep it up to date with the most current research we’ve completed and are ready to release to the public.